When we undertook a search to determine who was the highest paid education employee in Pennsylvania, some of the numbers cited above turned up.

We were a bit skeptical and, as it turns out, rightly so.

Evelyn Tatkovski, open records official for the Pennsylvania’s Public School Employee Retirement System, confirmed Wednesday that these particular anomalies were errors not in the actual PSERS data base, but in the bi-annual public information report the agency issues twice a year.

It was this report, provided to The Mercury, a sister paper of The Times Herald, in April which contained information accurate as of Jan. 1, that was used to build our database.

“They’re reporting errors and we’re not sure how it happened. It may have been a programming error, it may have been human error. We have had a change in staff over the last year and we changed computer systems in 2005 and sometimes some of the older records don’t translate well,” Tatkovski told The Mercury.

In addition to information being wrong, there is also information missing.

For example, we know David Goodin is the Superintendent of the Spring-Ford Area School District, but you would have trouble finding him in the report PSERS issued.

“We’re going to correct that information and re-create the report,” she said.

A new report will be issued July 1 and it is The Mercury’s intention to update the information in our searchable data base.